Grave Reflections
by blinkblink
Summary: An unexpected offering made in Philanthropy's early days. No pairings.


Disclaimer: Don't own MGS or the characters.

Notes: The original draft was written about two years ago, I guess, when the first trailers for MGS4 came out with Snake saluting in a graveyard. Of course, that shifted dramatically to become the following, but there you are. This fic precedes Useful and Resurrection, although it's not really a prequel, just in the same 'verse.

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It was raining. Snake didn't think much about rain. It provided good cover when outdoors, but left clear signs behind when coming inside. And, it made it damn hard to smoke, since he and Otacon couldn't seem to compromise on indoor smoking.

Outside the open window, which he was surreptitiously blowing smoke through, people hurried on with their lives wrapped in raincoats, sheltering under umbrellas and awnings. Boston was always busy, even during its hardest downpours. That fact alone made it an admirable initial base for Philanthropy – no one noticed or cared about a couple of men who might have to disappeared for days, maybe weeks, leaving and returning in the middle of the night. They had been set up for a month, although they were still finding their feet in the political world, and still working to procure the kind of equipment and supplies that they would need to be functional.

Behind him old wood creaked. He turned sharply, while pulling his cigarette from his lips and smoothly resting his hand on the window ledge. The wet bricks were rough under his fingers, the cigarette hissing in the rain.

Otacon was standing behind him, staring disapprovingly at the cigarette. The man could trip over his own feet, but he moved quietly when he made the effort not to stumble. The apartment, though, was full enough with creaking floors and wheezing hinges to bankrupt any casual effort at silence. Snake rolled his eyes slightly, but obligingly twisted his fingers to grind the cig out against the bricks with a final hiss.

If the man was nervous about objecting to the mercenary's conduct, he didn't show it. He had come a long way from the insecure, introverted, defenceless engineer he had been during the Shadow Moses mission, and these days Snake made a conscious effort not to frighten him back into that irritating stage. He dropped the cigarette to its fate and shut the window, turning completely to lean against it.

"What's up?"

The engineer seemed about to start into his usual anti-nicotine speech, but decided against it. "We need to go out," he said instead.

"Where the hell d'you need to be, in that?" Snake motioned to rain pounding on the window, surprised by his partner's abrupt announcement. They had nothing scheduled for the next week, not with a definite time.

"I've got something I want to show you. Call it an early birthday present." Otacon wandered off into the dark hallway. Snake followed him out, not bothering to flick on the ceiling lamp. Even in the dim lighting, he could see that Otacon was pulling his raincoat out of the hall closet. Snake followed suit, unlocking the lockbox kept on the top shelf of the closet and tucking an M9 into the waistband of his jeans.

"You don't know when my birthday is."

"Well, it doesn't really matter. Even if you just had it, it's still early for next year's."

Snake knew Otacon's birthday, having seen all his partner's private information on his old, now destroyed, identification. Otacon on the other hand, had no idea when or where Snake, who had been using falsified records and id long before meeting the engineer, had been born, and was seemingly irked by it. Snake was pretty sure the other man didn't actually want to know, just that he felt somehow unequal in this unfair information trade. It had been a long time since Snake had last tried to keep up any sort of acquaintance with anyone outside strict mission confines, never mind a friendship. His people skills were rusty. And the fact that Otacon didn't appear to have had many to begin with didn't make their odd partnership much easier.

Otacon opened the door, checked outside carefully in the manner that it had taken Snake nearly a week to drill into him, and stepped out into the eighth floor hallway of their apartment complex. It provided moderately priced apartments with few windows and fire escapes in good order, leading out to back alleys. Anything else was a secondary concern, although Snake was starting to think that plumbing might have deserved a higher place on the list.

At the elevator they waited for a minute in silence, and then entered to join a lone woman already kitted out for the rain with coat, boots and cane-umbrella. Otacon pressed the button for the basement, a parking garage. They had won a lottery for a parking space a week ago. The fact that the lottery had been decided by the landlord's computer made Snake suspect foul play on Otacon's part, but who was he to argue?

The woman got off at the ground floor, and the basement level chimed a few seconds later. Both men exited, again quickly checking before leaving the relatively safe confines of the elevator, and then made their way across the underground lot to their space. Snake, who had snagged the keys, unlocked the doors and pulled himself into the driver's seat of their beat-up Ford truck. The ugly and dented exterior hid reinforced panelling and framework, strong enough to at least enable it to handle being t-boned without taking fatal damage. It wasn't a long-term solution, but it was acceptable for the time being. Otacon hadn't protested his driving, so Snake started the car up as soon as the other man got in on the passenger side.

"Where are we going?"

"Out of town. Get onto the I-90."

"Hn." Snake pulled out of the garage, switching the task of driving over to his more instinctive thought level and considered their destination instead. The I-90 led west out of the state, but it was unlikely they would be going that far. At least, it was unlikely Otacon would direct him to go that far without warning him. He thought. Something stopped him from asking. Neither man was used to friendships, and theirs was a rocky one at best. If they were truly going to work together, they would have to be able to trust each other. And that meant trusting Otacon to lead him somewhere, even blind. Especially blind.

They had been living together for almost five months, now. Three weeks after Shadow Moses, when the situation with Meryl was going all to hell around him, Snake had received a call from Otacon. How he had gotten the number Snake still didn't know. He had said that he felt responsible for the production of Metal Gear, and now that the blueprints were on the web, he had been tracking several governments' early efforts in the direction of obtaining one. He had asked Snake's advice on who to go to to work against the production of more Metal Gears. Snake had asked for a few days to think about it.

Meryl had walked out on him two days afterwards, the two of them entirely too stubborn and proud to hold down a relationship that consisted of more than fighting and making up for it, and then fighting about that. Snake could admit that to himself right now, but he knew he would never be able to in front of Meryl. She had an intensely attractive character – not to mention her other equally attractive attributes – but she would never back down first, and neither would he, and that led to an entirely unliveable situation.

The day after she left her tracks in the snow, he called Otacon back with Gray Fox's last words ringing in his ears, and the groundwork had been laid for Philanthropy. Snake had travelled south from Nome to meet Otacon in Vancouver, and the two of them had made their way further south and east over the course of four months. In that time, they had learned to live together. Snake had learned not to smoke inside, and Otacon had learned not to wake the other man by surprise.

And now? They were friends, Snake supposed. In the not-quite-comrade, not-quite acquaintance space-filler definition of friend. Otacon spent most of his time on the computer, and Snake spent most of his trying to arrange for equipment to be delivered, or keeping fast and fit. But in the evenings they sometimes spent time together. And, Snake had to admit grudgingly, the other man had proved to be nowhere near as bad as he had feared. Sure, he was and probably always would be a geek, and his idea of good television was frankly freakish but... when Snake didn't feel much like talking he could chatter on at length without being irritating, let Snake receive the benefits of simple human companionship without having to make an awkward effort. And when Snake felt like talking or being amusing, which was rare but had been happening more often lately, he could be a decent listener too.

Snake came out of his reflections to find that he had driven out into the suburbs on autopilot, and now trees and front yards were passing by the windows, filling the landscape with a muddy green as well as the dark grays of the city. While the soldier in him found the city more practical, better for concealment and blending in, the part of Snake that wasn't taken up with risk assessments preferred the country. Even gray from the rain and the thick dark clouds overhead, he felt more relaxed out of the city. Slightly less expecting of the shot in the back that he was always waiting for.

"Take the next turnoff, the one after this one," Otacon cocked a thumb at the passing exit. Snake switched into the right-hand lane. The next exit, 212 to Watertown, came up in a matter of seconds, and Snake pulled off the interstate onto a slightly smaller highway. They continued on for a few minutes, before Otacon had him make another right hand turn onto a smaller road.

After a prolonged, and somewhat irritating, set of complicated turnoffs during which Snake wondered why he hadn't just let the other man drive, they eventually arrived at what Snake assumed was their destination.

They had ended up on a two-lane street with relatively little traffic. "Here, turn right," had been Otacon's next instruction. This turn off had not led to another road, but rather into a set of open gates. Next to them was a plain slab of granite engraved with the words Fairfields Cemetery in a plain cursive font. The gates were made of tall iron rods with elaborate spikes at the ends, the fence of tall dark stone topped by the same spikes. It matched exactly with Snake's idea of a classic gothic graveyard, dark foreboding skies included.

Although there was a large parking lot, only two other cars were parked there; the rest of the spaces were wet and empty. Snake pulled into one on the other side of the lot from the other two cars and killed the engine. The truck shuddered slightly with a strong wind, but there was no accompanying rattle. The rain had eased up.

"A graveyard? You brought me to a graveyard for an early birthday present?"

"I said it was like a birthday present, not that it actually was." Otacon paused, pushed heavy bangs out of his eyes, sighed. "Okay, I lied. Just get out." He suited action to words, opening his own door. Snake peered up out of his door's window. The sky was still ominously grey, but the rain had indeed stopped falling, for the moment. He pushed his door open, leaning against it heavily when another strong gust tried to force it shut on him, then slipped out and let the wind slam it behind him.

Otacon had already made his way to one of the paths leading into the graveyard. Snake locked the truck doors, took a quick, sharp look around, and followed.

"I'm not a graveyard kind of guy," said Snake, glancing around at the rows and rows of memorial stones. Apart from official funerals, which he had been unable to escape, this was true. He left his dead behind, and moved on. He had to.

If Otacon heard, he said nothing.

The graveyard, like many New England ones, appeared to be centuries old. Some of the tombstones were crumbling. Off in the southern corner there was what appeared to be a genuine stone crypt complete with eroding statues, the kind he bet all the neighbourhood kids broke into for dares. The grass was neatly kept, though, and the stone pathways were wet but clean. And bordering them, there were rows and rows of tombstones, sometimes breaking off into a section of crosses or simple small flat markers.

Otacon obviously knew where he was going, leading the way up a hill and off to the right. The graves here were newer, suffering from less decay and with more legible messages carved on the stones. A few more minutes' walking took them into the modern section, some markers now beginning to be adorned with bouquets or single flowers. The graves here were more tightly packed together in the completed rows, but beginning to thin out beyond them. Clearly these belonged to the recently buried. At the row headed by Margaret James, 1965-2000 Otacon took a sharp right, venturing out onto the soaking grass. He proceeded along to the last grave in the row. The dirt there was still fresh, and a small bunch of unexceptional flowers had been laid in front of the simple stone, a quiet collection of dark carnations and ferns beaten down by the rain.

It was at this stone that Otacon stopped. Snake peered at the stone, then looked up sharply at his partner. The tombstone, a plain square one with unadorned writing, read simply "Frank Jaeger 1954-2001."

"This is..."

"Exactly what it looks like." Otacon met his eyes for a few seconds, then glanced away back to the stone. "His body was recovered from Shadow Moses burned, but partially intact. The remains of Rex itself might have protected it from the fire. Ironic, I guess. It was taken by the government; they've been running tests on it ever since. I hacked into their reports by accident a week ago and found that they had finished their latest barrage of testing, so I terminated the experiments all together and had the body released to a false next of kin."

"You."

"Yeah. Well, not actually me, but an alias. I tried to find Naomi, but under such short notice I couldn't, and I couldn't sit on the body indefinitely." There was a tone of defensiveness to Otacon's voice. Snake knew the engineer didn't much like Naomi. Snake's own views on the biologist had probably coloured the other man's. After they had met up again, Otacon had tried to obtain a vaccine for the FoxDie virus from Naomi for Snake, under the pretence that he feared he himself had contracted it, and the woman had refused him arguing that he couldn't possibly have. Which, if the virus had been programmed correctly was most likely true, but her blunt disregard for his life and, if she guessed his true intention, Snake's, had soured the engineer towards her. "I have no idea what he would have wanted, but I figured this was probably better than nothing. I guessed the date; I didn't know when he was born, either." Otacon took off his glasses and began to clean them assiduously on the inside lining of his raincoat.

Faced with the options of reminiscing about Grey Fox or picking at Otacon's actions, Snake chose the easier of the two. "What about Sniper Wolf? Did they have her body, as well?" There were no other fresh graves in the area.

Otacon winced, slightly. The engineer had, he claimed, been in love with the beautiful enemy sniper, whom he had only known a handful of days. Snake had never given it much thought. He said he had been, and who was Snake to dispute it? "No. Apart from Liquid, the only other bodies recovered were those of soldiers, and Psycho Mantis. You know what happened to Raven. And its my bet that Wolf's... that her pack took care of her." Otacon lapsed into silence.

Wolves, Snake knew, did not eat pack members. But dogs in the arctic would gladly consume a human corpse, if no other food was forthcoming.

That well dredged dry, Snake turned back to contemplate the stone. He simply had nothing to think about in regards to Frank Jaeger, always Gray Fox to him. He had laid the man's ghost to rest in his mind six months ago. Fox had been the closest friend he had ever lost, but even then they hadn't been close, merely kindred spirits. And as a soldier, he had lost plenty of comrades. Putting them to rest, as callous as it sounded even in his own mind, was not often a matter of lengthy thought these days. Although Fox had been given more than most.

"Why'd you do this, Otacon?"

At the other man's quizzical look, Snake expanded, "Steal his body, bury him here. You only met him once, and he tried to kill you. You didn't owe him anything. And you obviously didn't care enough to even look up his birth date."

Otacon finished cleaning his glasses, returned them slowly to his face. "You're right. I didn't owe him anything. But... he saved your life. And he was your friend, wasn't he? I wanted, I'd like to think that he had a place to rest, at least because of that."

"Otacon, if you're trying to hint that you'd want me to do this for you..."

"That's not it at all," Otacon cut in before Snake could finish, abruptly. Snake was surprised to see that he seemed angry. "This isn't about me. I have no graves to visit, and when I die, I'm sure no one will visit mine." He paused for a breath. Snake blinked, slightly shocked. Otacon, although irritable when he hadn't eaten and when Snake smoked, was never morbid. In an unusual, and occasionally naive way, he was actually one of the most optimistic people Snake knew. Sniper Wolf, the soldier understood now, could have no grave. He assumed Otacon had never lost anyone else. It wouldn't be until a three and a half years later that Snake would learn why Otacon felt he couldn't visit his parents' graves, and then he would find that his friend had lost yet another loved one who would never have one.

"This isn't about me," he repeated, calming down, the cool quiet after a sudden storm. "This man, from what you told me, from what I heard, fought his whole life. Maybe he fought on the wrong side, maybe he did horrible things. But _he always fought for what he believed in_. Just like you, Snake. And the idea that after his death no one would even care enough to bury him is just terrible. He deserves better." If Otacon said anything else, it was lost in a strong wind, which blew both men a full step backwards. Snake shoved his hands in his pockets while Otacon pulled his coat more tightly about him. They stood, both staring down at the grave, for another minute. Snake's thoughts weren't on Grey Fox, and he doubted those of the man beside him were either. The wind came through again, and Snake cursed.

"Goddamn. Enough of this. Let's go." He turned and began walking out the way they had come. His shoes had long since soaked through.

"You know," said Snake, once they were on the path, "this is the first time anyone's ever worried about what would happen to me _after_ I died. Most of them were just concerned with me not dying. I think this shows real depth on your part, Otacon."

"Ha ha." Otacon paused, looked over at his partner and continued in a more serious tone. "I've left a message for Naomi somewhere she's bound to get it eventually. If you want to get in contact with her you could camp out here for a while." His tone gave away nothing of his mood.

Snake glanced at the engineer out of the corner of his eye. He wasn't sure if the other man was joking, or if this had been another reason behind his apparently sudden decision to bury Fox's remains. Snake settled for a dry "right," which seemed to cover both possibilities.

They passed an old man in a worn suit struggling his way up the path against the wind, flowers in hand. He was the only other human they had seen in the entire graveyard.

"Seems like a quiet place," said Snake, scanning the area more closely. Even then, he saw no one else.

"I guess. Weather's probably a factor." Now they were just two friends making small talk. Any earlier gravity seemed to have been left behind them.

They walked on in silence, until they were in view of the parking lot. Apart from theirs two cars remained, although one had changed since their arrival. Probably the new one belonged to the old man they had met, Snake reasoned.

"How much do I owe you for the funeral?"

Otacon shrugged. "It wasn't my money. It was siphoned off from a dozen accounts. Don't worry about it."

Any illusions Snake might have had of Otacon nobly dipping into his own savings account were promptly shattered by this casual admittance of embezzlement for personal benefit. It didn't match with his fuzzy idea of Otacon's moral standards, but he found he didn't mind. Maybe they weren't as different as they sometimes seemed.

The wind blew in again, this time bringing a light spattering of rain. Both men picked up their pace.

"Otacon," said Snake, as they reached the parking lot, feeling something was still left for him to say, "I'd come. To your grave, I mean." As he considered his abrupt statement, Snake was somewhat surprised to find that he meant it. Maybe there was something to their friendship, after all. Maybe it was just the bizarre mood the graveyard seemed to instil in him.

Otacon paused and looked at him through rain-flecked glasses. "Thanks." He turned towards the car. "But I don't plan to die before you." Again, Snake found that he wasn't sure if the engineer was joking or not. But he thought so.

The wind returned, bringing with it the equivalent of a pail full of rain and dumped it on the two of them. Snake cursed and pulled the car keys out of his pocket, unlocking the doors automatically.

"Snake."

Snake paused, hand on the door handle, and looked over the roof at his partner.

"I'd do the same for you." Otacon only paused for a second before opening the door, and swinging himself inside in one quick movement, shutting it behind him to block out the rain.

Snake looked back towards the graves, almost hidden by the thick cloud of rain. "Huh." He cleared his throat gruffly. "I'll hold you to that," he said quietly, and then opened the door.


End file.
